Menticulture Blog

Don't bogart that totalitarian regime, my friend

p2p. It stands for peer-to-peer. It refers to a kind of network architecture. Some people fall into the trap of thinking it refers to the way people connect on a one-to-one basis over the Internet, as in, for example email conversations. Metaphorically it may do. But that really isn't what it means. You might think I'm being a pedantic asshole, here, but the reason why I'm quibbling is really important.

The 'traditional' architecture used in interconnected networks, which allows web-servers and mail-servers to work is called 'client-server' architecture. You connect to a webserver in order to get 'served' web pages. When you do so you are a 'client' - actually your browser is the client, rather than you.

The reason this is important is because if you take out the server, you can't get the webpage. Okay, some content may get cached on other servers, or copies of the content may get hosted somewhere else, but the bottom line is that client-server architecture makes it easier to attack the distribution model. Hence you get, for instance, cease-and-desist orders against people hosting copyright-infringing content on their servers and they legally must oblige and comply, and law-enforcers can make it so.

Peer-to-peer technologies use a different kind of architecture, in which transactions between what would otherwise be called 'clients' take place between each other. This is not to say that 'servers' don't come into it. The old Napster, for instance, used a central server to connect peers to each other. The eDonkey file-sharing network uses servers to index users' files for searching. A Bittorrent file requires a 'seed' which may sit on a server rather a user's computer. The key thing, though is that the network is distributed across nodes, rather than centred around a server.

Now the reason I say all this is because I've been reading dissertations from media students about to graduate who think that email is a p2p technology, or that anything that isn't TV (i.e. a one-to-many relationship) is therefore p2p. I've even heard people who should know better (teachers!) call it 'person-to-person' technology, which is clearly bollocks. Peer-to-peer specifically refers to architectures which attempt to bypass centralised models. The benefits include things like reduced cost and bandwidth for distributors (webservers charge you for the bandwidth required to provide a copy of a file to everyone who wants it, while p2p means you may only need to provide one copy), but also it means that you have more chance of circumventing centralised controls and even snooping mechanisms.

It's important to get these things right because over the last decade, governments' desires to gain ever more control over and access to digital transmissions has gradually produced ever more draconian laws such as, in the UK, the RIP Act, and in the US, the DMCA. Even as transmission of data moves away from easily controlled central servers, governments try to get more control over the other centralised conduits by which your data moves: requiring, for instance, ISPs to store user activities, demanding encryption keys for encrypted data, etc. It might even be worth mentioning that the UK government currently wants to allow ministers to enact any laws they please - the very definition of totalitarianism. Don't you think an unregulatable and unsnoopable, and more importantly, an indestructable distributed transmission mechanism might be useful in such a scenario?